12 Years A Slave Streaming

[Julia Kozub]

Wehave successfully deployed Postgres 9.3 with streaming replication (WAL replication). We currently have 2 slaves, the second slave being a cascaded slave from the first slave. Both slaves are hot-standby's with active read-only connections in use.

Due to load, we'd like to create a 3rd slave, with slightly different hardware specifications, and a different application using it as a read-only database in more of a Data Warehouse use-case. As it's for a different application, we'd like to optimize it specifically for that application, and improve performance by utilizing some additional indexes. For size and performances purposes, we'd rather not have those indexes on the master, or the other 2 slaves.

No, you can't. Streaming physical replication works at a lower level than that, copying disk blocks around. It doesn't really pay attention to "this is an index update," "this is an insert into a table," etc. It does not have the information it'd need to maintain standby-only indexes.

Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.

Spanning the 60 years following the Civil War, this 90-minute documentary includes interviews with key Black history scholars like Khalil Muhammad, Mary Ellen Curtin, Risa Goluboff and Adam Green, in addition to moving reactions from descendants of both victims and perpetrators of the forced labor system. Giving voice to the thousands of victims from this period, Slavery by Another Name will challenge assumptions that slavery ended 150 years ago.

Throughout the series, Dr. Gates highlights tragedies, triumphs and contradictions throughout Black history, revealing that the African American community has never been a uniform entity and sheds new light on what it means to be African American.

Narrated by political and civil rights leader Julian Bond, the 14-hour series combines historical footage and contemporary interviews with key figures of the period; Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), and George Wallace have died since its release. Not only does this series serve as a comprehensive resource in this extensive history, it acts to preserve their testimonials for future generations.

The Black Power Mixtape tells the story of the Black Power Movement through the eyes of Swedish journalists. Drawn to America in the late 1960s by stories of revolution and urban unrest, the journalists recorded interviews with activists like Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Steale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver. Thirty years later, this interview footage was found in the basement of Swedish Television and was brought to life by Director Gran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover.

Taking a fresh approach to the story of the American Civil Rights Movement, Soundtrack for a Revolution features the powerful music from the movement. Focusing on the freedom songs sung by protesters on picket lines, in mass meetings, in paddy wagons and in jail cells, this film celebrates the vitality of the music and the infectious energy that it provided.

Inspired by the book Reflections in Black by Deborah Willis, Through a Lens Darkly explores the Black experience through photographs. Cameras have been used for over a hundred years as tools for social change, but in this documentary filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris explores how they have affected Blackness in America.

Using his only family album, historical images and photographs from Black luminaries like Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Anthony Barboza, Harris investigates the way Black photographers and their subjects have used the tool to both demean and empower African Americans. A powerful look at the history of race relations, representation, and popular culture, this documentary illustrates the powers of creativity through the lens of talented photographers.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.

This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

The published volumes containing edited slave narratives are arranged alphabetically by the state in which the interviews took place and thereunder by the surname of the informant. Administrative files for the project are bound at the beginning of Volume 1. These files detail the instructions and other information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the Federal Writers' Project.

In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers (see A Note on the Language of the Narratives). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C. The administrative files accompanying the narratives detail the information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the FWP. For more information about the interviewers, the people interviewed, and the processes of collection and compilation, see Norman Yetman's essay which accompanies this online collection.

In 1939, the FWP lost its funding, and the states were ordered to send whatever manuscripts they had collected to Washington. Once most of the materials had arrived at the Library of Congress, Benjamin A. Botkin, the folklore editor of the FWP who later became head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, undertook the remaining editing and indexing of the narratives and selected the photographs for inclusion. As noted above, he organized the narratives by state, and then alphabetically by name of informant within each state, collecting them in 1941 into seventeen bound volumes in thirty-three parts under the title Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941). The multivolume set and other project files, including some earlier unbound annotated versions of the narratives, are housed in the Manuscript Division and described in the finding aid for the records of the WPA.

Other records relating to the ex-slave project are among the FWP files at the National Archives and Records Administration (Record Group 69.5.5) and are described in the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, Vol. I. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1995). Volumes 2-17 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, edited by George P. Rawick and others (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79), present these narratives with a slightly different organization; the later volumes of Rawick's series also include ex-slave interviews housed in other archives. Anthologies containing selections from the Library of Congress collection include the Federal Writers' Project's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945) and Voices from Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), edited by Norman R. Yetman, author of An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives under the Articles and Essays tab. For additional works using these narratives as well as other slave narratives, please see the list of Related Resources.

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